Prey
by DezoPenguin
Summary: Margarita's pursuit of the Archmage's remnants has begun, her search to bring down the evil and the murderous among her former allies. But when she attempts to take down a necromancer who's set up his base of power in the slums, she will have to rapidly adapt to the reality of the task she's adopted if she wants to continue as the hunter, and not the prey.
1. Chapter 1

Margarita Surprise's foot slipped as she rounded the corner, the sole of her boot skidding on a wet stain of unknown origin on the cobbles. She teetered, windmilling like a character in a stage farce, and her flailing hand scraped the bare plank wall of the building, tearing skin and driving splinters into her palm, but she found no handhold to catch herself. The platform soles and high heels of her boots were horrible for balance, and with her running speed, the direction change, and the slip she went over, slamming into the cobblestones with bruising force to her knees and left forearm.

 _Get up_ , she screamed in her mind, sucking in breath. _Get up!_ The sudden loss of momentum was deadly; stopping had caused her body to recognize just how her legs were hurting, her chest and throat were burning. Panic, though, drove her to overcome it, and she pushed herself up off the ground. Pain speared through her right hand as the pressure thrust the splinters in deeper, but also through her left arm, and she was suddenly afraid she might have done worse than bruise it in the fall.

 _I can't think about that!_ She had to move. She _had_ to _move_! She could hear the pounding footsteps not far behind her, her pursuers closing in.

Or was that just the hammering of her heart, of her blood in her temples?

Margarita wobbled a bit as she regained her feet, and her first couple of steps were more like lurching staggers, but she managed to get moving again in the right direction. Her chest heaved, sucking in great gasps of air as she tried to keep moving forward, get her speed up to, if not a sprint, at least something faster than walking down the debris-strewn alley. The outlines of everything seemed blurred, smeared together like a bad watercolor, and it actually took her a couple of seconds' panic to realize that it was because her pince-nez had slipped off her nose and were now dangling from their chain, bouncing against her side as they swung with every step.

 _How did it come to this?_ sobbed in the girl's mind. _I was the hunter. How did I end up as the prey?_

~X X X~

 _Hudson Valois had a bad reputation in Tuthilltown. He lived alone in a shack that had become vacant when one of its previous occupants was hanged for burglary-with-assault and his widower had watched the drop, gone home, tied a noose to a beam, and joined the felon in death. He largely kept to himself, did his drinking alone, and only went out to shop at the market or visit the stews. No one knew where he got his money, but everyone took note of the fact that Whitetail Jack, head of the shakedown gang that took a cut out of most business in the slum district, never gave Valois any of his usual swaggering taunts when they happened to meet, and neither did any of his Tuthilltown Boys._

 _It was, therefore, a little unusual for him when he stepped onto the blood-soaked ground of the abandoned slaughterhouse yard, sunset streaking the sky rust-red behind the chateau spires to the west, that someone called out his name in what could only be a challenge._

 _He spat a curse through his ragged moustache and spun to face the girl who'd come in behind him._

" _What the hell d'you want?" he snapped, cracking his knuckles. Behind him, he heard a couple of snickers from the two men who'd been waiting for him, two of Jack's boys who'd brought the horse and wagon._

 _Undaunted by his obvious anger or the goons behind him, the girl took two steps forward. He'd have put her age at around nineteen, with a pixie face and reddish-brown hair in a bob cut. Her dress was an unremarkable brown, but the skirt was short to show off thigh-high platform boots, their sides slashed to display crimson tights and tied with bits of green ribbon. His first impression was that someone had sliced a librarian in two and bolted her torso onto the legs of someone of a…somewhat older profession._

 _Then she took out a slim pale-wood wand and the costume sort of made sense. Magicians pretty much tended to dress however they liked, regardless of the winds of fashion._

 _Valois knew about that. He liked his black slouch hat, and wore it even though it was over forty weatherbeaten years old, the leather stained and cracked. He'd taken it off the first man he'd ever killed._

" _What is it you want? Sunlight's fading fast." Indeed, the Rune he wanted to cast was most effective at twilight and he didn't want to have to wait another day to finish his work._

" _You're one of the Archmage's former servants, Valois. A murderer who used your magic to help attack those who wouldn't submit right away. Do you remember what you did in Geyser Park?"_

 _As it so happened, he did remember. The village had refused to bow to the Archmage and sheltered then-Princess Martelle in her escape from his forces. Calvaros had responded by making an object lesson of the place, sending five of his servant magicians to raze the village, slaughtering every man, woman, and child there and burning the place to ash. It was, Valois recalled, a memorial now. Dominic Spasso had once visited the abbey there that kept the eternal vigil, but he'd always had a taste for such jokes._

" _I see," he said. "So it's revenge you're after, then?"_

" _It's justice I'm after. Someone has to put an end to your plotting."_

 _Valois hawked a glob of phlegm into the soil. The stupid girl probably had no idea what she was even doing there. Still, there was only one way to deal with that kind of adamant sort, and that was the direct way._

" _Fine," he grunted. "Do your worst."_

 _His wand dropped into his hand from a wrist sheath up inside his right sleeve, similar to the one on his other arm for a throwing knife. The girl raised her wand and began to inscribe the first strokes of a Rune onto the ground._

 _Valois's own Runes inscribed on the inside of the slaughterhouse gates came to life instantly._

 _They were wards, Runes that he'd put up in advance. The first rule, after all, was to cover his own arse, and he took that seriously. This was his workspace, the residue of all the death and spilled blood over its years of operation nearly as good as a sacrificial altar, and he wasn't fool enough to leave it unguarded. The first use of magic by anyone but Valois himself or his familiars triggered the wards, two Runes springing ablaze and beginning to summon bound minions._

 _He immediately started preparing a Rune of his own nevertheless, since overconfidence usually was a working synonym for dead._

 _Valois was still behind her pace, but his attacker was nowhere near finished with her own Rune when the first phantom and skullmage spilled out of the wards and headed for the girl._

~X X X~

Margarita swung around another corner, figuring that changing directions often was her best chance of keeping out of her pursuers' line of sight. She crossed a winding lane and plunged down a short path, only to realize that that particular alley ended abruptly after twenty feet in a short flight of stone steps that led down to the riverfront.

Fear spiked, and she nearly froze up, but managed to beat the panic back and go forward, clutching at the wet brick wall for balance as she tottered down the stairs. When she got to the bottom, she saw that she had only two options: to dive into the murky, polluted water of the river, or to try to make her way along the narrow brick ledge of the retaining wall.

Neither way seemed particularly promising, but she figured that her clothes would only hamper her in the water; the river was a good thirty yards across and Margarita wasn't at all sure that the things there were any less dangerous than her pursuers.

Gingerly, she edged out onto the ledge. It was slick with river slime where the water had lapped up over it, and the fetid air turned her stomach as she began to work her way along. Her back was pressed flat to the bricks as she fought for balance on boots that might have been the worst possible footwear for what she was doing. So focused was she on not toppling forward that she didn't realize that there was nothing behind her until she was trying to lean against that nothing and fell back into a shallow alcove. Margarita learned what it was she'd fallen against the hard way when her skull cracked against the bricks behind her. She let out a sudden yelp of pain, then clamped her jaw shut, tears welling in her eyes, praying that she hadn't just given herself away. Clenching her teeth together, she tried to slow her panicked breathing and draw in air in long, slow inhalations in the hope that he oxygen-hungry wheezing wouldn't bring down the attention of her pursuers.

~X X X~

 _She saw it just at the last instant. Maybe it was the flames wreathing the phantom's sword, or maybe it was the unnatural blue glow of the ghost-knight's body, a color one would not expect to see without it meaning something._

 _For whatever reason, though, the girl realized that something was wrong, and turned her head just in time. Valois cursed under his breath as she flung herself backwards, just avoiding the phantom's first attack, a vicious sword-slash that rebounded off the earth in a spray of dirt._

 _What did happen, though, was that the girl's partially-finished Rune began to flicker and waver, its structure beginning to collapse._

 _She barely rolled out of the way of a second chopping slash that carved into the slaughterhouse ground, and this completely broke the last of her concentration. It might have been the fear or the mental effort needed to focus on remaining alive, but either way she was unable to maintain the concentration needed to hold the mana of the unfinished Rune in place. The green light faded, flashing outward into the air._

 _The other monster summoned by the second warding Rune, the skullmage, rattled forward threateningly, but the magician ignored it, as well she should; its magic was only capable of harming astral entities like the phantom, despite its own physical form. It didn't matter, though; the phantom would be more than enough. Valois almost felt pity for her as she scooted backwards, staring up in fear. The ghost-knight slashed down at her again, and it seemed that it had actually learned from her earlier frantic efforts to evade it, for its cleaving blow was not a directly vertical chop but came down at a diagonal she couldn't roll away from._

 _In a last, desperate attempt to save herself, the girl threw her wand up as if to parry. The burning flamberge struck it dead-on, the slender piece of wood shattering under the impact. But for some reason, perhaps because the girl had just been channeling mana through it, or perhaps she had actually enchanted it sometime in the past, when the wand broke there was a soundless explosion, a sudden rush of magical energy._

 _A creature of substance wouldn't have been affected at all; the girl certainly wasn't and neither were the skullmage or Valois as he felt the edge of the mana wave brush across him. But the phantom was a purely astral creature, even its sword a construct of magical force that used the energy of its flaming blade to harm what was physical. Instead of cleaving on through and into the girl, the sword was flung back by the blast as was the phantom itself._

 _Valois had to give the girl this: she reacted fast to the new events. Seeing the phantom tossed away, she rolled over onto her belly, planted her hands on the earth to push herself up, got one foot square on the ground, and lunged to her feet almost like a sprinter might have. In the next instant, she was in a full retreat, sprinting out the slaughterhouse gate._

 _Whirling to face the men by the wagon, Valois roared, "Don't just stand there; get after her!"_

 _He could almost see the words, "But she's a witch!" forming on one man's lips, but they died there, unspoken. After all,_ she _was running in terror, while_ Valois _was right there, staring him in the eyes and obviously capable of doing a whole lot worse than the chit could manage._

 _His partner showed more brains._

" _You want her alive or dead?"_

" _Alive's better, but either way works. Now get going!"_

 _They didn't wait, but took off running at once. He'd have preferred to send the phantom, even summoning more of its ilk to help; the undead were relentless in their pursuit. But he couldn't afford to have familiars running through the streets, lest they attract the attention of the authorities._

 _The Tuthilltown Boys were good with their clubs and knives. If they got their hands on the girl, they'd handle her readily enough. And they knew the streets and alleys of the slum, ruled it like their own little kingdom, while all logic marked her as an outsider._

Come to think of it, weren't there rumors about a couple of us getting killed recently? _He hadn't really given it much thought, as the kind of people who made up the Archmage's remnants weren't exactly strangers to violent death. Valois hadn't even bothered to mark the names before establishing it was no one he had regular contact with. And yet now this girl had showed up, challenging him to a duel of magic, calling him out on his past crimes…_

 _Well, just maybe there was more to the rumors than chance, after all. Some self-appointed vigilante, probably someone who'd suffered at the Archmage's hands—or more likely, her family had, given her age. Of course, a magician might well change her outward appearance, and society being what it was even hundred-year-old women might well pick a teenager's face, but Valois would bet the girl was close to her actual age: anyone powerful enough to have lived long enough to use youth magic wouldn't have just blundered in on him without a plan._

 _He shrugged and spat another glob of phlegm. It wasn't his problem, for now, and sunset was fading fast. Focusing his will, he set out to do the work he'd originally begun._

 _If he ran out of time and had to wait because of the girl's interruption, then she'd better pray that the Tuthilltown Boys killed her cleanly instead of bringing her back. Valois had learned one lesson from the Archmage at Geyser Park: when somebody crossed him, he made sure they ended up as an example to others as to why that was a bad, bad idea._

~X X X~

"Dammit, Jean, where'd she go?"

Jean scowled at his partner.

"What do I look like, a fortuneteller? We know she came this way, so let's find her."

"She's a witch, though. What if she uses magic?"

"She's a witch who just ran scared from Valois. Which one d'you want to take your chances with, huh?"

"Yeah, but she isn't here. Where'd she go?"

"How about down?"

Jean pointed towards the river.

"You think she tried to swim for it?"

"She wouldn't be the first. Remember that little weasel last year who tried to shave a few off Jack's cut?"

"Oh, yeah, that fence." His broad face stretched into a nasty smile. "Got caught in that current in the middle, run down to Edge's Bend, bounced around in the eddies, and was tossed ashore for the mudlarks to strip bare. Think the chit did the same thing?"

"Looked a little prissy for it to me, but who knows when people get scared. Let's go check it out, George."

They walked down the steps, stopping at the edge of the filthy water. An experienced eye could see what they'd mentioned, how the river seemed to run faster in the middle, while the more polluted runoff swirled in stagnant eddies that lapped against the embankment.

"No sign of her in the water. She wouldn't have been that far ahead of us."

"She hiding underwater? Or get sucked down?" George suggested.

"Maybe."

Jean looked left and right at the ledge that ran along the embankment. He saw no figure clinging there, where they would have been out of sight from the shore above. He looked down again, at the brickwork and at the water.

"I guess she got sucked down."

"Valois's not going to be happy."

"She'll catch up on shore eventually. They all do; this river doesn't keep its dead. But we'd better go make sure she didn't duck into some building on the way over, or else he's really going to let us have it when she doesn't wash up."

"Huh? Oh, yeah."

They turned and clomped back up the stairs, leaving nothing but the river flowing by in their wake.

~X X X~

Margarita let out a long breath as she heard the two men clump noisily away. She'd been—was—literally trembling with fear as she'd tried to shrink back as far as possible into the little recess without letting a toe peek out or a wisp of skirt catch the breeze and give her position away.

From what she'd heard, though, she'd been successful. Hopefully, they thought she _had_ been foolish enough to go into the river, where an unknown fate would await her. It had been lucky she hadn't tried it, not in her cumbersome outfit and being an indifferent swimmer at best. Even without knowing about the treacherous flow she wouldn't have wanted to risk it.

But if not into the river, then where could she go next?

The alcove she'd hidden in was little more than that, a recessed space with a flat, solid back wall. Probably it had been built for some architectural reason, whether because the arched top was good for something or if some original plan, later discarded, had meant to place a sewer outlet or access tunnel there. Whatever its virtues as a hiding spot, it was not an escape route.

Gingerly, making sure to maintain her balance, Margarita leaned out so she could see down the embankment. The ledge stretched off both ways, but it wasn't as easy as just picking a direction. If she kept on the way she'd been going, it looked like it was at least a hundred yards in that direction before she'd reach a break in the ledge, likely for another flight of steps or other way to get back up to the shore. Going back meant less than a tenth of that.

Arms and hands hurt as they were, she'd have trouble taking advantage of such handholds as there might have been in the brickwork. Above all, she wasn't sure that she could keep her balance in her high-soled boots on the wet, narrow row of bricks, not for that distance.

 _Not sure?_ she thought bitterly. _No, I'm absolutely sure that I can't._ Margarita's panic was ebbing a bit now that she wasn't in any direct danger, and with rational thought came full awareness of just how bad her situation was. Fear could drive a person to extremes they'd never have otherwise confronted, merely by presenting the alternative as far worse.

She'd have to be doubly careful, though. She'd have to work her way back to the stairs, but more than that she'd heard them say that they'd search the nearby buildings—which meant that they'd be lingering in the area, able to see if they'd happened to be in the streets at the time she passed by, and that would put her right back at square one, only tired and hurt besides.

Her legs were trembling as she made her first step out onto the ledge, trembling from exertion, from the pain in her head, arm, and hand, and from the ebb of her panic-driven adrenaline rush now that the immediate threat had receded and her fear was more cerebral than visceral.

 _Not yet!_ Margarita barked at herself. _You can't give way yet!_ Gritting her teeth, she took the next step, sliding her lead foot forward and bringing the second one out onto the ledge. This time she was facing the wall instead of the river because she didn't want to stumble when she got to the steps the way she'd fallen back into the recess, for fear she'd slide right down into the water. The solidity of it reassured her somehow, the rough brickwork against the side of her face and hands as she edged her way along. She drove her fingertips into every chink and crack in the mortar, trying to give herself any edge or extra protection that she could to keep her footing.

Once, she swayed a bit and her left arm screamed at her when it had to take her weight, and she was forced to hold her place for a couple of seconds while the red haze cleared from her mind. She had no room for doubt any more—it was definitely fractured, making it all the more important for her to get to a place of safety where she could give herself magical healing.

 _One more step,_ she told herself edging forward another foot or so. _Just one more step._ It became a mantra, repeated over and over in her mind. She couldn't think about the journey. She just needed to focus on one step at a time, and sooner or later she'd get there. And she did. Finally, shakily, after several long, agonizing minutes she stepped off the ledge onto the steps, wobbling slightly as the sheer relief of making it safely washed over and through her.

That was when a big hand reached out, fisted itself in the front of her dress, and yanked her the rest of the way up the steps.

~X X X~

The girl sagged in Jean's grasp as she lost her balance, her shins cracking against the steps as he dragged her up to the alley, then spun her so that she was slammed up against the wall, hauling her to her feet by main force.

"Thought you were so smart, sneaking along that ledge, didn't you?" He shoved his forearm under her chin, across her throat, applying choking pressure. "Too bad you forgot about footprints. I couldn't see where you were hiding, but I could certainly tell which way you'd gone. So I sent George down to cut you off if you went the other direction and waited here for you myself. Looks like I'm the lucky one today, since we put a half-crown on which one of us'd get you."

The girl, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky that she'd picked this direction. George was still a little scared of her, what with her magic and all, so he'd have been sure to just crack her over the head or stick his knife in her right off, then shove her body into the river and call it good. Whereas Jean had no problem taking the extra time to put her out and haul her back to Valois like the necromancer wanted. That'd mean a much slower and more painful end for her. But Valois would be happier with Jean that way, and that was more than enough to justify it for him.

~X X X~

Margarita wanted to scream, but she couldn't; the crushing arm across her throat sealed that off as effectively as it was stifling her breath. She'd been trapped, played by the two street roughs, and had walked right back into their clutches. The knowledge of how she'd been outsmarted made her feel almost as sick as the awareness of her situation did, the realization that she would soon be in Valois's hands.

It was that thought, though, the idea of falling into his grip, that galvanized her. Bad enough that he was a necromancer and murderer, but if he learned the truth—that Margarita had once been one of the Archmage's remnants herself, sent to the Silver Star Tower to find and free their master's soul but had ultimately turned on them and was now hunting her old compatriots—she would be very lucky if even death afforded her a respite. A skilled necromancer never thought of death as just an ending.

The sudden terror drove Margarita into a frenzy. She struggled, squirmed, tugged and clawed at the man's arm and kicked at his legs and feet. None of it worked, though; he was much stronger than her and more skilled in this kind of violence as well, as shown by how he stood with his hips angled away from her so there was no chance of a knee to the groin connecting.

In fact, her frantic struggles were doing nothing other than tiring her out faster, wearing her down so that her oxygen was running out that much sooner. Spots danced in her vision, leaving Margarita at the edge of consciousness. Her hands fell from his arm, strength ebbing.

 _There's no way to break his grip. He's too strong, even if I use both hands against one of his._ She needed some kind of weapon, but she didn't have one, not even the broken stub of her wand which she'd dropped in her flight.

 _A weapon…_

In a last, desperate inspiration, she reached for his waist, stretching towards the knife he wore on his belt. If he'd been choking her with his hands she'd have never made it, but with his arm bent there was just enough range for her to hook her fingertips around the end of the handle and yank it free. Margarita's fist clamped as tightly as it could around the hilt, the pain from her injured palm barely penetrating her clouded awareness. With the last of her dwindling strength, she rammed the knife into the thug's belly, the underhand plunge angling the point up under his ribs. She only realized that she'd found the heart when he collapsed, his weight falling onto her and dragging her down beneath him to the alley floor.


	2. Chapter 2

She couldn't say, later, how long she'd lain pinned beneath the body of the street thug. Margarita had been at the end of her strength, nearly at her last bit of air when the pressure at her throat had slackened, and the fall to the ground had been as firm an impact as if she'd been tackled by the man. Physical and emotional exhaustion alike threatened to drag her under, pull her into the black haze of unconsciousness. It sang to her like silent bliss.

Once again, though, it was fear that forced her hand, that gave her the spark she needed to act. The other thug—George, this one had called him?—wouldn't wait forever, and even if he did there was still Valois to consider. She assumed he hadn't sent his familiars after her because even in Tuthilltown he couldn't have ghostly warriors prowling the streets without rousing the kind of attention that drew guards and witch-hunters and Royal Magicians, but that wouldn't last. After nightfall he could act with impunity, and given time to prepare, follow a strategy and use the right Runes to employ more subtle means to track her down and finish the work.

Margarita had even obligingly left behind the part of her wand the phantom had broken off as a possible reagent for any tracking magic, a scent item for magical "bloodhounds."

Grunting and wincing, she squirmed her way out from beneath the dead man. Since she'd left the knife in the wound, there was less blood than there might have been, but her hand was still slick with it and stains splashed her dress. Feeling the sticky warmth of it made her gorge rise with the realization of what she'd done. He was not the first person she'd killed, not after two previous remnant hunts, but those killings had been done by familiars, at a distance. They held the same moral responsibility—even more so, as they had been premeditated assassinations, not desperate acts of self-defense—but there was something cold and remote about them, lacking the visceral immediacy of killing with her own hands, plunging the knife into a man's body…

She whirled away from the corpse and was noisily, messily sick.

Margarita wasn't entirely sure why she did what she did next. There was some confused idea of delaying Valois in learning what had happened, though whether it would help at all to do that, or whether that was even a relevant goal she couldn't say. Shame, perhaps, was mixed into it, the desire to hide what she'd done, or fear of it being discovered.

For whatever reason, she gritted her teeth and dragged the corpse down the alley to the steps. It was hard going; the dead man had weighed over two hundred pounds and Margarita couldn't even use her left arm to its full strength. Still, somehow, she managed to get it done, then pushed it down the rest of the way with her feet until it fell into the murky water. She wondered if it would just be carried downriver or if its wet clothes and the man's possessions would drag it down, but either way it was done, and there was nothing else to do for it but move on.

The first thing to do was to get out of this alley and away from the river; it would be the first place that anyone would come looking for her. Night was settling in, the sky deepening to a dark indigo, and while across the river the street-lamps were blossoming into life there were no such things in Tuthilltown. Unlike the wealthier sections of the town, this district had to make do with moonlight and such illumination as managed to spill out from the buildings.

It was an environment that made crime and violence all too easy, but it also played into Margarita's hands, for at any distance she was just another nameless shadow, her distinctive appearance cloaked. She moved down the alley towards the street, trying to move cautiously. Above all, she fought to keep from swaying or stumbling, sure that if she did it would look like she was drunk or, as was actually true, hurt.

 _Easy prey._

Bad enough to have one man and his minions following her; the last thing she needed was to attract fresh, unrelated enemies.

She began to make her way cautiously through the nest of streets. Though she'd gotten some familiarity with the neighborhood, things looked much different by the deepening night, the lurking shadows and the orange glows behind certain windows looking like the lambent eyes of some great, hideous beast.

 _What kind of resources does Valois have?_ she wondered. _Is he coming after me, or trusting to his thugs while he attends to whatever business he was up to?_

There were other people out as well, and Margarita had to suppress the urge to flinch away from them. They were of various types, some strutting boldly, some slinking in the shadows, some brazen and some cringing. She moved as swiftly as she could to try to get to one of the larger roads, where there would be more of a crowd and less chance of getting ambushed by some back-alley mutcher.

 _But then what? I need a place to work magic quickly, no matter how useful a crowd might be for safety._ She _needed_ to heal, first and foremost, and only magic could allow her to do that without days of care.

What she needed was someplace isolated, out of the way, where she wouldn't be seen and where she wouldn't have someone walk in on her as she was setting her Rune. An alley wouldn't do for that reason; she never knew who might follow along, or see the green glow of her Glamour magic.

Instead, she looked at the various buildings as she passed them, checking for lights. It was just after sunset, too early for people to be abed, so there would be lamps or candles lit anywhere that someone was home. Abandoned buildings or those whose owners were out would stay dark. The former was what she would hope for, since they were more likely to be unlocked.

She found one up the street from a tavern, where loud singing indicated that the drinking had already begun. Liquid cheer would be flowing freely, but later on, she knew, that cheer would be drowned by too much liquor and too much reality, leaving those who were left to the explosions of anger that resulted in fights or that left solitary drunkards staggering out for any shelter they could find. An abandoned house or shop would be a perfect place for sleeping it off, and sure enough Margarita found a back door that was swinging open, its latch broken.

The place was obviously used regularly, she could tell from the stink of urine and vomit, the inevitable results of a body ridding itself of a night's debauch. There was no sign of anyone there, though, and it was unlikely there would be for hours. Margarita wouldn't need anywhere near that long.

Customarily, magicians used wands to draw their Runes. Prepared in advance, those tools made it easy to channel mana at a steady rate into the pattern. But it wasn't necessary; any pointing tool would do, only with a little more concentration needed to control the mana flow. Even a finger would work, without any tool at all, so long as the magician was able to control their "penmanship" in the absence of a guide. Both Master Lemon and Mr. Advocat from the Tower had been strong believers in magicians practicing diligently with wandless casting, so that the wand acted as an aid, not a necessity. With her own wand broken, Margarita was very happy that they had.

The Fairy Ring had been the very first Rune that she'd learned; she'd long since known it by heart. Under ordinary circumstances, she could all but draw it in her sleep, and hadn't needed a grimoire for it in years.

Doing it in the dark, hand throbbing, body aching, the hand she was drawing with injured, still oozing blood from the deeper punctures, that was something different. It took her three attempts to get it right, the first ruined when a wave of dizziness and nausea swept over her, the second when a spasm of shaking racked her hand.

Finally, though, it was done, and the shining glow of the Rune danced boldly, illuminating the decrepit hovel she'd sheltered in. Hopefully no one would see the shine through the gaps between the boards covering the windows or leaking out the barred front door, or if they did they wouldn't be curious or courageous enough to disturb a magician at work.

Even after the Rune was set, she still had to enhance it with additional mana to allow the elves she would call to use their healing magic. This was all in accordance with ancient contracts struck between magicians of antiquity, even predating the days of Solomon, and the beings of Faerie; Glamour was not about compulsion or force, at least when not dealing with brute beasts. More time passed as she completed this work, but at last she was able to call the first elf.

"Heal me," she asked, and in return the boy-like figure stretched out his hands, letting a shower of green light wash over her. Margarita shuddered, and before her eyes, the splinters in her palm started to push themselves out of her flesh, forced out by the regrowing skin to drop and patter on the dirt floor. Knowing that repeated uses would tax the elf's resources, she had already sent out the call for a second elf, and by the time the first had to stop to refresh its own mana resources the second had arrived.

It took a total of five castings of the elven healing to restore Margarita to full health, a sign that the head injury or that to her neck might have been worse than she'd thought, but when they were done she was pain-free, the greenstick fracture in her forearm repaired, her throat able to take in a breath without burning, the pulsing ache in the back of her skull and the spurts of dizziness that had accompanied it washed away. She felt like a new woman, refreshed and ready for…

 _And now what?_

That was the question, wasn't it? Her immediate problem was escape, but was that really possible? Valois would certainly pursue her; men of his stamp didn't live to middle age by ignoring when someone tried to kill them. And even if she escaped his immediate reach, he'd seen her face, and she'd threatened him with specific reference to the Geyser Park massacre. Even if he thought she was after revenge for just that incident rather than pursuing the remnants generally, she knew that he kept in contact with others and might well warn them or seek their help, and sooner or later someone would identify her.

Then they would be hunting her.

That was it, then. Escape was nothing but a pipe dream. She had to finish it, finish Valois here and now in Tuthilltown or risk ending up with no choice but to return to Professor Gammel and deliver everything she knew about the Archmage's followers into the hands of the Crown in exchange for their protection. They would hunt the remnants down ruthlessly, rooting out every last one of Calvaros's stray servants.

Including those who were no threat to anyone, who just wanted to live peacefully, who'd only sided with the Archmage for the sake of being able to practice magic freely without realizing his evil, or those who like Margarita herself had been coerced or simply desperate.

Which was the entire reason Margarita had begun her hunt in the first place. Those like Valois had to be found, punished for their past atrocities and prevented from committing new crimes, but it wasn't right to punish the innocent along with the guilty. It was this that had ultimately decided her on her course: unable to put things in the hands of the Crown and equally unable to let the remnants simply go, she had taken on the roles of investigator, magistrate, and executioner.

It was easy to say something like that in the safety of the Silver Star Tower, where danger, morality, and people's lives were academic concerns, not practical realities. It was harder when challenging a woman face-to-face, defeating her in magical combat, and ordering the blow that struck her dead. Harder, but still not difficult, not with the dedication of purpose still bright in Margarita's mind. It was a quest, a crusade fought to destroy evil and protect the innocent, even if it was vigilante justice outside the law. It was the stuff of heroes from ballads and storybooks.

Indeed, Margarita had been reassured by her reluctance to kill, her disquiet at it after the fact—hadn't that just proven her worthiness more, to have respect for human life that her enemy did not?

 _And how many ballads are there where the hero loses?_ she asked herself bitterly. It sickened her to think of her own naiveté. Just because she was a trained magician now instead of a frightened child, did that make her invulnerable? Hardly. She'd been utterly routed. _And now you're thinking of running to the Crown._

As a child in her home village, she'd been protected by Michael Lemon from those who would burn her as a witch if they'd known of her magic. At the Tower, Lillet Blan had protected her from the Archmage and Surely, and then Professor Gammel had protected her from the law despite her origins. Now she looked to the Crown authorities to protect her from her past? She found herself recoiling in nausea from the implications.

Margarita was a grown woman and a graduate of the Magic Academy. She didn't want to need anyone's protection any more. She didn't want to go running like a scared child just because things had become hard for her. She had gained power, but she hadn't seen it for what it was. She realized now that she'd thought of her magic as just another guardian, an absolute force that would keep her safe as Master Lemon had taught her to deceive witch-hunters and Lillet had cut down the Archmage's ghost. She hadn't seen it for what it was: a tool, a skill, a resource she could draw upon.

And so when it had failed her—no, when _she_ had failed to _use_ it properly—she had panicked, like a little girl who'd watched bandits kill her mother or a noble whose bodyguard had been cut down by an assassin. But ultimately, the failure was hers, a failure of wit, a failure of will.

All her life, the most important choices she'd made had been driven by her fear. It had given her the force to act when she'd needed to, the necessary spur to overcome doubt, confusion, or hesitation. It had been the same while chased, while in the hands of Valois's lackey. Fear had driven her to overcome injury, to survive.

But she didn't want to be afraid any more. She didn't want to live her life by cowardice. She believed in the quest she'd taken up. It was important to her. But fear would not allow her to succeed at it, and neither would blind, arrogant trust in magic. She would need willpower, courage to know that danger, even death were very possible and to move forward anyway. And she would need to use her mind, to plan and overcome her enemies, to use her power to its best effect. The power was real; it was only that she had to use it in the best way, like a swordswoman fought using her blade.

She laid it out for herself: _I do not want to run to the Crown. I believe in what I'm doing. I can't throw it away because of one setback. I also can't afford to fight the combined forces Valois can rally against me, the whole network of remnants chasing me across the kingdom._

Therefore, she had to defeat him. Not some time in the future, but here and now. She had to finish the night's work, but this time do it right. A dead man didn't send any messages, and she wouldn't have to be looking back over her shoulder.

Of course, it was one thing to say that and another to actually do it. After all, she'd already tried that once and failed miserably. It was a harsh lesson in just how naïve her thinking had been; she'd been expecting the kind of straightforward magical fights as she'd faced at the Tower, both in class and in those few battles she'd had for real. That it would just be a matter of finding the magician and fighting one-on-one.

It was foolish, really. She wasn't a jousting knight or a noblewoman fighting a duel of honor. She was something else entirely, a hunter stalking man-killing beasts in human form, and she needed to treat it that way, to use her every advantage and anticipate that her quarry would do the same against her.

After all, the ones among the remnants who deserved to be treated with decency and honor were the ones she wouldn't be raising a hand against in the first place.

Thankfully, she had plenty of mana reserves, even despite what she'd spent so far on three broken Runes and one successful one, plus the elf summonings. There had been mana crystals in the slaughterhouse yard, but Valois had likely claimed those already for his own work, or if not could more easily do so since the phantom-summoning ward he had active would link to a Hades Gate, enabling him to call up ghosts at once.

 _No_ , Margarita cut herself off. _I'm already falling into the same trap._ Her goal wasn't to _fight and defeat_ Hudson Valois, it was to _kill_ him.

It was high time she did something about that.

~X X X~

Valois was not a happy man.

Jean and George hadn't come back yet. That was his first problem. The Tuthilltown Boys were nothing more than street criminals, and on the low end of that scale besides, but they were basically competent at strong-arm work and they knew every nook and cranny of the slum better than they knew their own arse. It shouldn't have taken them this long to run down one scared girl, particularly one who likely didn't know her way around the neighborhood and wasn't exactly going to run fast in those platform boots of hers.

That meant that something had gone wrong. Either she'd managed to work some magic on them after all—unlikely, without her wand and, more importantly, without time to prepare a Rune—or she had some kind of confederate in wait.

Valois could buy the second one. The way she'd barged in and challenged him without any real attention to her surroundings, that was the kind of naiveté that made for a perfect cat's-paw. Or maybe she'd just had some kind of ward on her against physical attack. Personal wards were tricky magic, particularly ones strong enough to do serious damage to an enemy, but she might have been skilled and powerful in an academic sense. She had felt confident enough in her magic to believe that she could beat Valois in a straight one-on-one duel.

 _Being stupid and naïve doesn't mean she's weak, either._ In fact, in Valois's experience the naïve turned out to be strong, if only because those both weak and naïve were usually also quickly dead.

All in all, the continued absence of the two men meant that the situation had more likely than not taken a turn for the worse.

No fool he, he'd taken the trouble to prepare. Using the Hades Gate and Purgatory Runes activated by the gate ward, he'd summoned three more skullmages and five more phantoms. He'd summoned ghosts as well, four of them claiming a crystal as a sanctuary to provide mana for him, something he would have done regardless, had his night gone as planned.

Which, of course, led him to his second reason for anger. The magic he had wanted to perform was time-sensitive. He was trying to bind the spirit of a greater magician into his service for a year and a day, to compel it to provide its knowledge to him so that he'd be able to elevate his own ability over time. But it was a sensitive affair; because he was performing an act fundamentally greater than his own magical force could stand he needed circumstances to be on his side: the place for the casting, the astrological significance of the date, and yes, the time of day.

Because of the delay caused by the interruption, and the further delay caused by his need to shore up his defenses, twilight had passed by. He'd missed his optimal time, and the summoning was as likely as not to fail outright. More than that, his next opportunity wouldn't be for another four months, and he'd have to make revisions to the Rune to adapt to the variant conditions.

Ordinarily, Valois wasn't one for theatrical gestures when he wasn't trying to make a specific point by them. He wanted his enemies dead, not toyed with. Maybe it had something to do with his being a necromancer, as he'd noticed that all too many of his brethren who concentrated in Sorcery were prone to the overblown and grotesque as if they were ham actors chewing the scenery onstage. But this time he was going to make an exception. It wasn't just that she'd inconvenienced him, but that she'd gone about it in such an appallingly _stupid_ fashion that made him grind his teeth in fury.

Then, pain exploded through his left shoulder. He clutched at it reflexively, feeling no wound but only a rapidly receding ache. Another pulse of pain lanced through his lower back, and another through his right calf, and at last he did what almost no one ever did without specific reason: he looked up, just in time to jerk his head aside so that an arrow only trimmed his whiskers instead of hitting him in the face. He found himself staring up into a swarm of fairies, tiny women in bright green dresses, flying on insect wings, and raining elf-shot down on him.

He'd have already been skewered were it not for the amulet he wore under his shirt, an emergency defense that one of his fellow remnants had crafted for him. It had blocked the first several magical shafts, letting some of the force through but preventing flesh and bone from being pierced. Unfortunately, it wasn't a sovereign remedy, only good for about five attacks before it needed to recharge its mana.

Valois ran.

His best move would have been to get to the gate, to flee through the streets where even after dark his enemy likely wouldn't want to have the fairies pursue. The problem was that there was too much open ground between he and the gate, and what was more he'd reclosed it so now he'd have to stop to swing it open. That was far too much opportunity for the fairies to turn him into a pincushion with their arrows.

Instead he turned and ran three steps, then dove under the wagon the Tuthilltown Boys had been driving. Elf-shot thunked into the ground at his heels and blasted splinters off the wood above him, but he remained unhurt.

For now.

There was nothing stopping the fairies from simply dropping down to ground level and shooting him from there. He had no time to draw a Rune to save himself, and he had no direct means of magical attack that would have allowed him to defeat the entire group of familiars.

What he did have, though, was his own familiars.

Aggressive as they were, several phantoms had already left their posts to pursue the fairies, and now Valois sent out a mental summons to those who'd held their ground, along with the skullmages. The problem was that the phantoms could easily swat the fairies down, but to do that they had to be able to hit them. Indoors, that was little problem, but outside as they were now they could simply fly out of the ghost-knights' reach. The skullmages' magic had ranged effects, but only worked against astral creatures, and while fairies _could_ shift to an astral form and back again, there was no reason for them to do so.

But by hiding under the wagon, Valois had given them a dilemma. They could not stay in the air and shoot at him, but if they descended, they opened themselves up to attack. In bodies of substance they were easy pickings for the phantoms, and if they went astral they became even easier targets for the skullmages. And if they stayed airborne, they risked giving Valois the time he needed to scribe Runes, call more familiars, or otherwise prepare a counterattack.

Instead of choosing, though, the fairies—or their master—went with both options. Six of the fairies stayed in the air, firing down at the skullmages, whose brittle bones made them more vulnerable to the elf-shot than the astral forms of the phantoms. The other two, though, flew around behind the wagon and descended to ground level on the side away from the gate.

While the phantoms were astral creatures, they could not just pass through the wagon, but had to circle it. One went in each direction while the others remained clustered at the front of the wagon at Valois's direction. Valois rolled towards them, away from the fairies, but not fast enough to keep them from shooting him. One bolt took him in the hit with another stab of pain but it was the second, the one that caught his left arm, that caused the problem. For this one, his amulet failed, and the elf-shot punched through the muscles of his forearm, even grazing the bone, and Valois screeched in pain.

He didn't stop moving, though. Valois was a man used to desperate situations and he'd have been dead a half-dozen times over if he'd let pain or injury stop him in the past. He burst out from under the wagon, pushing himself up with his good right hand and bolted towards the gate. His cluster of phantoms fell in close around him, forming a barricade against further arrows with their bodies the way a king's knights would. More than one took an impact, one even falling as the fairies switched their targets from the skullmages to them, but they shielded Valois while he got to the gate, unlatched it, and hauled the heavy wood door open far enough for him to slip through into the street.

Valois figured that he was safe enough out there; his enemy would have to be pretty brazen to have the fairies fly over the wall and chase him down (though a thought nagged at him, she'd been willing enough to have the fairies fly _to_ the slaughterhouse—but fairies could sneak in the shadows as well as humans, even better given their small size and mobility). He needed to get to his home, where he had defenses in place, resources—though he'd have to beware of ambush when he got there.

He got half a block down the street, then turned up an alley, seeing nothing there but a cat curled up in the remains of a broken barrel, no fairies waiting to pounce or even something like a unicorn hidden away here where it could lurk behind debris and garbage until he passed. Valois scampered through the alley quickly, clutching at his wounded arm as he ran.

Three-quarters or so of the way through, he heard the cat yowl behind him. Valois staggered, suddenly dizzy. The wound—shock, blood loss? No, that wasn't it…

 _Sleep spell_ , he recognized, even as it settled over him. The cat hadn't been a cat at all, but a grimalkin, easily capable of blending in with the streets and alleys. _Glamour and Sorcery both._ Had he been right about the girl's confidence in her magic, or did she indeed have a mentor or confederate?

He had a strong suspicion that he'd never know.

~X X X~

Margarita stepped out from the far corner of the alley and advanced the few feet that brought her next to the prone man. She looked down at him for nearly a minute, as if unable to believe that she had managed to bring him down like this. She rolled him over onto his back, leaving his closed eyes facing up at the sky.

She looked down the alley, where the grimalkin's eyes glowed an eerie, pale green. They seemed to be measuring her, the cat-devil waiting for something, her order to come and finish off the necromancer.

"No," she murmured aloud. "No, I won't do that." In the future, perhaps, in magical combat or if she sent a familiar to carry out the job in her absence, but not now. She wouldn't let herself take the easy way out again.

The built-up heel of her right boot settled over the center of Valois's throat, and she bore down with all her weight and strength. There was a sickly crunching sound, a choking rasp, and then…nothing.

She was shaking as she stepped back from the corpse. An ambush, a lure, the execution of a victim rendered helpless, this wasn't anything like a heroic quest against evil magicians ought to be. Where was the justice in assassination, in _murder_?

Margarita didn't know the answer to that. This was what it meant to be a hunter, though, the true shape of the path she had chosen, and if she couldn't accept that then next time it was as likely as not to be her lying where Valois was.

Some day, perhaps, she'd learn whether the hunt proved to be worth the price.

For now, though, she beckoned to the grimalkin. There was still George to attend to, who'd seen her confront Valois and could connect her face to two violent deaths.

And then the hunt could begin again.


End file.
